Feast: An interview with the founders Mike Thelin and Carrie Welch

Portlanders celebrate the city’s diverse culinary scene with festivals dedicated to everything from food carts to fruit beer. But it took Mike Thelin and Carrie Welch, food industry visionaries (and experts in event planning), to bring it all together in a nationally recognized food festival.

Feast Portland hits town Sept. 20-23, bringing with it top chefs from around the country. Before the festivities began, most of which are downtown in Pioneer Square or Director Park, we sat down with the powerhouse pair and got them talking about how this mouthwatering festival came about.

Q: What gave you the idea to create a Portland-centric food festival on a national scale? Thelin: Portland has a grass-roots culinary culture. People here are driven by their own creativity, and they do what they do because they love doing it. No one had come along and said we want to start a festival here and promote what you are doing. But it needed to happen because the talent in this city is insane.

Q: Why call it Feast? Thelin: That was hard because we knew it had to be different from the get-go. It would have been easy to call it the Portland Food and Drink Festival, and it probably would have done fine. Kate Sokoloff, who is the creator of Live Wire Radio and one of the great creative people in Portland, actually named Feast. I told her what we wanted to do and she said, “Well it’s a feast.” As soon as she said that, we knew Feast was it. Feasting can mean different things. There’s a feast for the eyes, a feast for the mouth and a feast for the soul. Food engages you on so many different levels. It can be intellectual, ethereal, purely primal or rustic, and feasting feeds all those emotions.

Q: What sets Feast apart from more established festivals in towns like Austin (Texas) and Aspen (Colo.)? Welch: It’s a festival that gives a sense of place. It will bring to light and illustrate the different parts of Portland’s food culture in different ways. Yes, we already have a cocktail week and an indie wine and food festival, but those are very specialized events. We’ll have all those elements coming together at Feast. Thelin: The lineup is overwhelmingly locally driven. The ingredients are completely local, and even all the beers served will be from Oregon.

Q: What are locals going to get out of it — particularly those who are already very familiar with the local food scene? Thelin: It will be an absolute assault of food. You will go to these events and they will be the greatest food parties you’ve ever been to. For example, you will walk into the Sandwich Invitational and see that it features 12 to 15 chefs from around the country, including local chefs Naomi Pomeroy from Beast and Ben Bettinger of Imperial. Every event is an opportunity to experience the local chefs you love, and all the chefs you’ve read about, in one place at one time.

Q: If Feast is about celebrating Portland’s food scene, why bring in high-profile chefs from other parts of the country? Welch: The idea is that every year a new wave of chefs could come and collaborate with our chefs and help everyone become inspired and keep their skills sharp. Don’t underestimate how much the (visiting and local) chefs are talking to each other about their events and how those conversations inspire them. Thelin: There are a lot of festivals that bring in talent from elsewhere and it just becomes the out-of-towner show. We didn’t want to do that and we don’t have to do that here. Our talent is among the best in the country, so every part of Feast is designed to be a collaboration that creates an exchange of ideas. We saw that one of the greatest things about the International Pinot Noir Celebration is that it creates a collaborative culture for winemakers. We wanted to do the same thing for local chefs.

Q: Most celebrity-chef-driven food festivals are big-ticket, high-society events for people outside the area. Will this be true of Feast? Thelin: We’re offering an a la carte ticket option that speaks to the fact that this is a festival for Portlanders. If someone just wants to spend $30 and go to one event they can, or they can get the all-in ticket option. Our goal is to engage everyone with what makes Portland, Portland. Welch: And I think what really makes Feast stand out for locals is that it’s a multiday festival with a huge number of simultaneous events going on. You have to choose your activities and make your own schedule. You can be dining with April Bloomfield and Jenn Louis one night and Seamus Mullen the other night.

Q: Is there more to the festival than nonstop eating and drinking? Welch: This festival has a mission to end child hunger through our charitable partners, Share Our Strength and Partners for a Hunger-Free Oregon. We have some programming that speaks to that mission on Saturday and a Whole Foods Market speaker series that runs throughout the weekend that will help shepherd people through intellectual discussions about food. I think people will see that we’ve re-imagined the panel discussion into something that is a little more dynamic.Then we’ll also have hands-on educational classes. Local cookbook author Diane Morgan is doing a class on root vegetables, and cookbook author Andrea Slonecker is hosting a class on making artisan pretzels at home. (Bakeshop’s) Kim Boyce is doing a baking class, and Camas Davis (of Portland Meat Collective) is doing a butchery class. So if you want to jump in and get your hands dirty, we have that option. Thelin: In Oregon, we do things. We are a culture of doers. We make things here and we want to showcase those skills at Feast.